These aren't the droids you're looking for

Starcat reviews Star Wars comics: STAR WARS (part two)

The story so far: Luke and C3PO are looking for R2D2.

What's wrong with Luke's face?

Luke is too involved now to go back and resume his old life. He is over the rainbow, and just like in The Wizard of Oz that means the story becomes colour from this point on. That seems the obvious reason for the sudden transition to colour pages to me, though I have heard some cats put forward the alternative explanation that the black and white pages were written before the invention of colour.
Gamma Longcat's theory, that some pages are black and white to keep down production costs of the comic book, is not taken seriously by other cat academics and I mention it only out of a sense of completeness.

The scene of combat between Luke and the Sandmanny plays out differently here than in the film version, with Luke being seen to be struck by the Sandmanny's weapon, accompanied by a "WHRAF" sound, but he is then rescued before being sent to sleeps.

Now we are introduced to Ben Kenobi, who confirms he is Obi-Wan Kenobi in accordance with the law of conservation of narrative detail.

The plot moves swiftly to the scene where Ben Kenobi sees Princess Leia's message. The message itself is different in the details: Princess Leia names her father as "Bail Antilles, Viceroy of Alderaan" and addresses Ben Kenobi as both "General" and "Commander".

This leads on to Ben Kenobi telling Luke about his father and the Jedi Knights.

The compression of the story from the film to the comic is felt keenly on this page. Luke is given his lightsabre and told about Darth Vader and "the Dark Side of "the Force"", but in the film this scene is contrasted with us seeing Darth Vader make use of the Dark Side aboard the Death Star.

Luke, briefly sporting a 5 O'Clock shadow, does not want to go to Alderaan with Ben Kenobi, but is talked round to it in a couple of panels. This misses out one of the most gratuitously scary* film scenes in all of Star Wars when Luke goes home and sees Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru turned into skeletons by Stormtroopers - the event that convinces him to go with Ben Kenobi and sets into motion all that follows.

* Or at least it was until betrayed and murdered by the Dark Side of internets memery.

I don't know why Ben Kenobi's face is blue in this picture.

They go to Mos Eisley Spaceport where Ben Kenobi uses the Force to hypno-eyes Stormtroopers. This serves a dual purpose within the narrative: to both escape from the Stormtroopers, and to demonstrate to Luke (and us viewers) what the Force is capable of in the hands of a Jedi Knight.

We meet Han Solo and Chewbacca, both great characters (although Han is basically only a prototype for Lando Calrissian). The scene when Ben Kenobi chops off a manny's arm with his lightsabre is omitted, so when Han says

You're pretty handy with that sabre, old man.

then we must either assume he knows of Ben Kenobi by reputation, if we didn't know about the missing film scene, or else groan at the pun if we did.

Here Han wants to be paid

Ten thousand.. in advance.

and for the sake of brevity we don't see Ben Kenobi haggle him down to seventeen. I think that's what happens, I'm not good at numbers.

Instead we skip straight to the Millennium Falcon flying into space, missing out the brief action scene of the Stormtroopers catching up and shooting at them. That means the above pictured panel is our first sight of the Millennium Falcon in the comic strip.

Up to this point various film scenes with Princess Leia, Darth Vader and Governor Tarkin have been missed out to keep the action with C3PO and the other heroes. But now we reach an important scene that cannot be dropped so, for one page only, we cut to...

This is our first meeting with the principal baddy of Star Wars, Governor Tarkin of Whitstable. He shows he is a baddy straight away by blowing up the planet Alderaan. Taking up half of the page, the planet blowing up is one of the biggest and best pictures in the comic so far, as if to emphasise its importance to the plot.

Even though this is not a cliffhanger, it seems to me that this is a dramatic moment on which to leave things for today. Join me next time when our heroes will reach the Death Star and attempt a prisoner transfer from cell block 1138.


Appendix 1

There are lots of different versions of the Star Wars film that have been released over the years, and it may be that you know a different one from us cats. The format in which we are familiar with Star Wars is a VHS transfer of a Betamax recording of the September 1983 showing on the Grampian region of the ITV channel.
In other words: the best version of Star Wars.

While the first set of adverts were paused out of the recording, we are fortunate that the second ad break remains on the video. This occurs between Luke taking his "first step into a larger world" and Governor Tarkin receiving news from Dantooine.

There are eight adverts, and because they are adverts from 1983 they all look very dated now, like they come from another world that existed long before us cats or even the internets were made. These adverts are:

1. Smarties



2. Maxell Video Tape



This is an especially exciting advert because there is a cat in it!

3. The Great Composers magazine



This advert is useful in dating the broadcast of our copy of Star Wars to 1983, due to its publication date. Another advert appears in a later ad break that is even more useful for this purpose, but I will discuss it when we reach that advert.

4. Spry Crisp 'n Dry



5. McCain Pizza

I can't find a video of this on the internets. McCain Pizza is a kind of manny noms. The advert is most noteworthy for having Ian Holm provide the voiceover.

6. British Gas fires

Another advert that I cannot track down on the internets. The advert claims that

they're so beautiful to look at

so it is a shame that you cannot judge for yourselves, mew.

7. The Home Computer Course magazine



This is the second advert within the same ad break to have an Ian Holm voiceover. He must have been a very busy manny in the early 1980s.

8. Jaffa Cakes



This advert from the internets is too long to be exactly the same one as we know from Star Wars, but if you missed out the first 16 seconds then it would be the same.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away....

Big Gay Longcat presents:

Starcat reviews Star Wars comics

Episode IV 1: STAR WARS

Star Wars is the best film evar* of course, but there is also a comics version of it from 1978 that is less well known. Now that I have finished helping my best friend Scary Cat review Sapphire & Steel, this is my own project to look at this comic and the subsequent comic adaptations of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, as well as comics set between those latter two films that were made before Return of the Jedi.

These comics are great because they have lots of Lando Calrissian in them, the best character in Star Wars even though he is not the main character, and they are far, far more worthy to be considered canon than the so-called 'prequel trilogy' of rubbish films made from 1999-2005.

But first we have to go back to 1978 to the first Star Wars comic, an adaptation of, appropriately enough, Star Wars.

* I know Big Gay Longcat likes Star Trek films better because they have Captain Kirk in them, but he is wrong.

I don't know why some words are in CAPITAL LETTERS and some words aren't. I think the "CIVIL WAR" it refers to is between mannys who wanted all capitals and mannys who didn't.

While the film version of Star Wars avoided this problem, this comic has fallen into a too-common trap of films where having credits at the start causes them to interfere with the plot - a famous example of this is Touch of Evil. Here we see an attempt to build suspense

At this moment:

interrupted by the colorist's credit, so it reads like

At this moment: Marie Severin, Colorist

That makes for a very dramatic credit, lol. I don't know what a Colorist is, maybe it deserves a dramatic credit?

On page 2 we are introduced to Lord Darth Vader, who would once have been considered the scariest baddy in all Star Wars but whom chronic media overexposure has reduced to being less scary than Bertie the pug puppy.

It is already clear from this early stage that the comic is not going to be sticking closely to the exact dialogue from the film. Instead of saying

Commander tear this ship apart until you've found those plans, and bring me the passengers - I want them alive!

Lord Vader says

Start tearing this ship apart, piece by piece, until you have those tapes! And find the passengers of this vessel! I want them-- alive!!

The same fundamental information is conveyed, but in a different way. While possibly done to annoy the purists, I think it is more likely that this is so the dialogue can be better fitted to the comics medium, such as being broken up over several panels or condensed as required, or to include exposition that would otherwise be lost with no other place for it.

Also on page 2, and in stark contrast to Lord Vader, we are introduced to the heroic protagonists of Star Wars, C3PO and R2D2, as well as Princess Leia.

Princess Leia is introduced to us from C3PO's point of view, as the exposition captions explain:

The unknown girl who kneels by the smaller robot is probably beautiful by human standards...

But, Threepio, being a robot himself, takes scant notice of her...

As C3PO and R2D2 escape in a lifepod, Princess Leia holds off the Stormtroopers until she is captured. Her one line of dialogue (and not one from the film) is

I've set mine to kill!

and is a concise way of establishing her characteristics as a physically active participant who is unafraid of violence.

Down on the planet, C3PO and R2D2 also get captured, and then they are sold as slaves to Uncle Owen. The scene shown on this page - which introduced another main character, Luke Skywalker - sticks quite closely to the film version.

C3PO is hired by Uncle Owen because of his useful programming and language skills, and R2D2 is only hired because another R2 unit has "a bad motivator" (i.e. is borked) and this allows C3PO to speak up for his friend. If not for their friendship, the goodys would not have got far in Star Wars. C3PO is great!

R2D2 is impatient to get on with the story and shows Luke part of the recording of Princess Leia to get him involved in the plot too. Luke says "she's beautiful!" proving that he is a human and not a robot or a cat.

R2D2's ploy works because Luke connects the name "Obi-Wan Kenobi" with "Old Ben Kenobi" which is close enough it seems.

R2D2 is so impatient that, having heard where Old Ben Kenobi lives, he doesn't even want to wait for the other two but sets off by himself.

While C3PO's dialogue is for the most part* close to the film version, Luke's is changed significantly to provide more exposition about what is happening. Even though R2D2 is his best friend, C3PO is not happy with how he has acted and sides with Luke over it, a touch that gives their friendship more depth and even a kind of realism, for all that they are robots in a space opera setting.

That is all from me for now. Join me next time when we will meet more old friends and foes, and there will be colour!

* He doesn't go "Yipe!" while looking like he has just been towel-flicked on his bum, lol if he did though.

Starcat and Scary Cat Can Has Been Assigned (Part Six)

Starcat and Scary Cat review Sapphire & Steel: Assignment Six

WARNING: SPOILERS

The last Sapphire & Steel story is the strangest of all, and not even Starcat can make sense of it.

The almost-deserted location has shades of Assignment Two, with some nice atmospheric scenes of Steel exploring in part 1. A four-part story, this gets a move on compared to the pacing of the longer stories from earlier in the series - compare this to Assignment Three, for example, when Silver took until part 3 to turn up - now he's joined them even before the titles of part 1.

We're back to the three-manny dynamic of Assignment Three which we cats do enjoy, and with Silver present from the start it is even more solidly a three-manny show. David Collings almost seems trying to steal the show from David McCallum at times, playing Silver as the closest thing Sapphire & Steel has to comic relief, but McCallum's having none of it, he's firmly in control, underplaying Steel superbly as always. Steel is both Starcat and Scary Cat's favourite character, and Scary Cat says he likes Steel even more than Avon, if you can believe it!

Joanna Lumley's hair is looking very '80s in this. It makes a change from in earlier Assignments when David McCallum had '70s hair that stood out as being 'of its time' more than hers. Now she definitely has the more dated hairstyle out of the two.

Things get stranger and more interesting after the ad break in part 2. The rain after the second time-skip adds tremendously to the atmosphere - to almost Assignment Two levels in some scenes - and the cliffhanger is pretty good as Johnny Jack's arrival is built up to.

There is a lot of "looking out of windows" acting in this story, which we cats interpret as clever foreshadowing of the moment at the very end.

At the halfway point of the story, we are not as impressed with this Assignment as with the other four-parter (Assignment Four) by the equivalent point. It's slower, and less seems to have happened - Silver's presence may disguise that a little because it adds an extra character for interaction. And there's been nothing scary in this so far to rival the faceless Shape.

But then, in part 3, Johnny Jack arrives and is sketched in a few actions and a few lines of dialogue - the actor breathing life into him. Then there's those bits where the guest characters are changed utterly when they adopt identical suits and postures (and, the second time, Sapphire-like eye effects), becoming somehow sinister. Scary Cat likes this a lot more; things are picking up. Starcat isn't so sure, and thinks things are making even less sense than usual for Sapphire & Steel.

Assignment Six is the ultimate (in both cat senses of the word) example of writer P J Hammond's technique, a foundation of Sapphire & Steel, of making fantastical plots work despite being, to use a technical term, bollocks. To do this the writer is supported by the director and principal actors who create atmosphere and take the thing seriously respectively. The resolution to the story cannot be anticipated by the cat viewer because it relies on the made-up abilities of extra-terrestrial non-feline characters, but it does not feel like a cheat because it has been thematically foreshadowed (like all the best science fiction).

Except in this case it feels, to us, like a step too far.

We noted the "looking out of windows" acting above, which Starcat reads as laying the ground for the final, iconic shot of Sapphire and Steel looking out of the cafe window in space - and isn't the reflection of stars in the window just the subtlest and yet most effective piece of SFX in the series? It works for both Starcat, who likes stars, and Scary Cat, because it is a scary reveal (he also likes stars, and Starcat).

But, to us, "the trap" is too made-up to be the kind of ending it wants to be. It's no Blakes 7 (the last episode Blake  - now there's an ending for you - was made in the same year as this), leaving you wanting more while at the same time being the perfect place to stop. Early Sapphire & Steel made being infuriatingly enigmatic into a virtue, but to put Sapphire and Steel into a trap and then leave them there - supposedly forever - demands an explanation as to how. And, furthermore, why Silver can't just rescue them five minutes into Assignment Seven, Part 1, using equally made-up methods.

The Woman is also a weak link. We don't just mean Johanna Kirby's acting, though that most certainly doesn't help matters. First she's a victim caught in the time bubble - that's revealed to be a ruse, fair enough, mew. Then she has secrets and wants to share them with Steel - that's part of their plan, again mew. Then she's some kind of robot or something - hang on. Mew? Then she's been in on it all along with Man. Mew mew mew! Confused cats! There's at least one twist too many concerning her character in the last part, and it detracts.

The other guest characters are fine, suitably sinister in their grey, er, suits and moving in unison. Properly un-manny-like, in contrast to their down-to-earth alternative forms, and they make for good antagonists as a result. Man being so much stronger than Steel is a bit of a disappointment, as it makes it look as though Steel has no superpowers at all, certainly when compared to all the things Sapphire and Silver have done, in this Assignment and in the others. He can't even be superstrong, one of the few things he has demonstrated he can do.

With the revelation that the whole Assignment was a trap set up from the start, Assignment Six as a whole is retroactively changed to stand or fall by how much you like the resolution. We don't deny that the atmosphere is strong (though not a patch on the first two Assignments, a shame) and the acting from McCallum & Lumley as good as ever, and they sell that ending like few other actors could, but...

Scary Cat likes it because it is scary even though it doesn't make much sense. Starcat doesn't like it as much because it doesn't make sense even though it is quite scary.

Doctor Who and the Iron Legion

Look, it's the Marvel 1985 Summer Special Classic, one of Duncan's oldest Doctor Who books from 30 years ago!

There are two stories inside it, of which the main feature is The Iron Legion (or, to give it its full title, Stan Lee presents: Doctor Who and the Iron Legion). Colin Baker was the Doctor on TV at this time, but here the Doctor looks like Tom Baker. This is a great cover picture, and depicts a scene from later in the story.

It starts with robots and tanks attacking mannys, seemingly just for the lols.

The Doctor is in a shop but the manny there says "They're coming!" very dramatically before a robot comes in.

The robot shoots the manny right in the beans, removing any possibility of doubt that they are the baddys. The Doctor escapes from that robot and we the readers are introduced to General Ironicus, who is in charge of the robots but will later turn out to only be a henchrobot of the main baddys.

His design is very striking with his birdy head, making him a memorable character. The Doctor escapes from more robots back to the TARDIS and he pilots it to where the robots have come from.

The Doctor is mistaken for Caesar and is then immediately captured by General Ironicus.

The Doctor has seen enough to work out what is going on, but he is in trouble and will have to escape first before he can do anything about it.

The Doctor is thrown into the arena to face the Ectoslime, which is a huge and scary monster and is not supposed to be cute at all, even though it is a bit cute with a derpy face. This is the scene from the cover and is very dramatic, although it is not a moment that is vital to the plot.

The Doctor avoids being nomed by the Ectoslime using his brains in a properly Doctorish manner, which makes General Ironicus even more grumpy. Instead of killing the Doctor some other way, he makes the Doctor be "a slave in the Imperial Air Galley!"

This story was already pretty good, with an epic sense of scale, properly evil baddys, and a quick pace meaning lots happens on every page, but now it gets even better as the Doctor begins to make friends - first with Morris, who is another slave with a distinctive look and way of speaking, allowing him to develop a characterisation very quickly.

Lots happens on this page, from the Doctor and Morris becoming friends to the Doctor seeing a clue as to what is going on. As he says, "I've discovered the horrifying secret of the Galactic Roman Empire!" but that is held back from us readers to keep us in suspense for now.

Morris and the Doctor escape from the galley and are chased by "alien guards" but they get away and then meet another friendly character, the old robot Vesuvius. Vesuvius is, if anything, even more distinctive in look and speech than Morris, but part of his distinctive speech pattern - a stutter - is a deliberate attempt to evoke Claudius from I Claudius.

Because Vesuvius is called Vesuvius it is a bit more subtle than if he was called something that sounded a lot like Claudius, just as the Emperor is not called Caligula but instead "Adolphus", a name which manages to bring in a completely different kind of baddy.

Vesuvius takes the Doctor and Morris to the temple of the gods, where the Doctor's suspicions are confirmed.

The design of the Malevilus is impressively evil-looking, and their evil is confirmed as they nom the mannys that General Ironicus has captured for them.

This is a very scary bit. I am glad that cats aren't noms; not even Malevilus noms, because Cats Aren't Noms. The Doctor, Morris and Vesuvius escape and are chased by alien guards and the Malevilus for five pages - an exciting chase sequence that Jon Pertwee's Doctor would be proud of.

Morris gets a gun and shoots some of their pursuers, but just when they think they have managed to escape again...

... they are shot and Morris is injured! (Note the clever way that exposition is interwoven with action in the first few panels of that page.)

Morris goes

and the Doctor says "Goodbye, Morris, old friend." Even though the Doctor only met Morris 13 pages earlier, it is believable that he would call him "old friend" because of the adventure they have been through together and the Doctor's personality.

This is an emotional scene, but the action doesn't pause for long. Before the end of the page the Doctor and Vesuvius have discovered "the hall of the Bestarius -- the Beast Men!" and the Doctor has a plan to get them to help him.

Setting the Bestiarus loose, the Doctor heads for a final confrontation with General Ironicus and Magog, leader of the Malevilus...

Magog is established as the real main baddy of this story - she kills Ironicus off because her organisation does not tolerate failure. I really like the stylised way Ironicus's death is drawn to be horrible without being graphic.

There is a much more scary bit to follow...

...as Magog transforms to her true form, taking four panels to do so. This is also depicted really well for maximum scariness. Any scarier and I will have to call in Scary Cat to help me finish this review.

This bit reminds me of the powers of Sutekh from Pyramids of Mars. But Magog has made a mistake as the Doctor uses the T.V. camera to make Magog appear on television, causing the citizens of Rome to revolt against the Iron Legion and the Malevilus.

Magog is going to nom the Doctor but, like General Ironicus earlier in the story, wants the secrets of the TARDIS first. The Doctor turns Magog's greed against her and tricks her into activating the deus ex machina ending.

"Good job! Every TARDIS carries a spare dimension as standard equipment!"

"Good job" indeed. By far the biggest weakness of The Iron Legion is the way this resolution comes out of nowhere and the ending is very rushed in comparison to the earlier sections of the story.

The other Malevilus are destroyed while trying to escape from the Bestiarus

AND -- THE TERROR OF THE MALEVILUS IS FINALLY OVER!

Vesuvius is made the new Emperor by the citizens (because of course he is; he's Claudius as I already mentioned) and the Doctor leaves. The end.

The ending does feel rushed, with Magog and the Malevilus, the Emperor and the Iron Legion all taken care of in less than a page-and-a-half. But that doesn't matter so much because what came before was so good, in storytelling techniques, characterisation and in the art. This is a classic Doctor Who story in every important sense of the word.